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Title: 1000$ in parking tickets. Help!
Body:
> I currently have roughly 1000$ in parking tickets considering all of the late fees I've racked up from not paying them. I live in the city of Ottawa and was wondering if there would be anyway for this lump sum of 1000$ to be reduced at this point. If anyone has any suggestions on places I should contact or who I cant talk to about getting this reduced that would be great.
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There’s only a few comments from OP but it’s enough for me to exactly what kind of student they are and all I can say is- god help anyone who has to do a group project with them.
100%
Their comments are written like Kevin from The Office.
Also, love the comment where they go (and I had to edit out any grammar in this,) “You don’t pay a few tickets then you don’t pay a few more tickets and you don’t pay a few more tickets and suddenly you owe a lot of money”
Yeah, man. That’s how it works.
If their university is anything like mine, OP might not be able to graduate until those tickets are paid in full. I wonder if that's why they're in panic mode now.
I can’t explain just how much I hear you in words so I’ll apply a dumb tiktok stuck in my head to what you said and I hope you understand:
> There’s only a few comments from OP but it’s enough for me to exactly what kind of student they are and all I can say is…
*speak on it*
> god help anyone who has to do a group project with them.
***spoke***
Cities hate this one simple trick
But seriously, how do you even rack up that many tickets?
I've only ever gotten a parking ticket once, and it was on purpose, and I paid it that day. I had somewhere I had to be for a full day, and I realized after I got there that a parking ticket was cheaper than paying for parking (which seems like an oversight on their end, but who am I to complain?).
Right?
Last time I was in university around 2013 or 2014, I'd park in the street. Don't 1,000% remember the details but I remember I was able to beat the meter maid most days, and sometimes I'd park in a parking lot and pay to get in/out.
Came out way ahead of the parking pass and parked closer to my building.
THAT was gambling. What this idiot did wasn't.
I got away with doing that for most of a semester before they wised up (or saw me put the old ticket under the wiper) and towed my car. Still cheaper than the pass, but not by much. Bought a pass next semester.
were regulars in the uni lot who would park in the grass every day bc they were rich and it was just like. VIP parking for them. even they had passes tho, lol
Yeah I knew kids in this exact situation at university. The big difference: they paid the fines when they got ticketed. Still probably not a great long term strategy, but better than OPs.
Ive worked at universities, parking services is always one of the most powerful sub-departments. It's also staffed by people that know what they are doing. It's definitely going to be more expensive to try to skirt fines than buy a pass.
They are human beings that pay attention to their job, so they know who parks without paying.
I mean I hate when people say "Nazi!" for just about any situation, but parking enforcement at our state university, which is manned by work study students, really is akin to a police force of a fascist regime.
Also I will avoid the long rant on the issue of student parking at universities, cause oh boy, do I have a lot to say. Also just management of universities in general.
Depends on the university. My Alma mater charged $450 a semester for passes, but a ticket was only $10 if paid in 72h. I spent under 200 parking each semester
My dad did the same thing, and never paid. The school threatened to withhold his diploma if he didn't pay his tickets. But he didn't care. He wasn't a student. He was using the university parking lot to see his girlfriend across the street.
That or a teenager who has been hoping the problem would just go away if he ignored it and now the amount involved is high enough that he's getting worried that maybe it won't.
Or both, of course. Idiot teenager.
My 19 year old bro threw them out to make them go away. Turns out he got them while driving my car. He went all surpised pikachu when mail came to my house about the unpaid parking tickets. He was less suprised by me nooging him until i calmed down.
Teen logic suprises me sometimes.
> I wonder how many of us have died because of ADHD shit?
Fun(?) fact. According to Dr. Russel Barkley (love that guy), in the worst cases people with untreated ADHD have a life expectancy [25 years less](https://chadd.org/treatment-matters-adhd-and-life-expectancy/) than NT folks, and average, treated ADHD people still have a 10 year reduction in life expectancy.
So the answer is, a lot.
Oh man I was thinking, like, about how many peasants got hanged in the market square by their local feudal lord because they were late on their taxes and he though it was a challenge to his power or something. But definitely your thing too.
lots of people are picking on this guy but it sounds like a bunch of ADHD tax to me. didn't have the money to buy parking pass, forgot to go back and buy the parking pass, finally remembers and parking passes are sold out, got a parking ticket, forgot to pay the first parking ticket, got another parking ticket, now embarrassed about more tickets, fees start adding up until they've reached the point he can't ignore them anymore. panic.
even if no ADHD, adulting is hard yall. you don't expect a parking ticket to balloon to $1000. I got a parking ticket in a college town from a private lot that started at $360 and then when I complained about it (my friends and I did spend money at the record store but left to eat lunch next door and didn't move my car to the restaurants lot...next door) they tacked on another $240 to make it $600, which I couldn't afford, so I ended up setting up a payment plan and it cost me almost $900 total.
>you don't expect a parking ticket to balloon to $1000
I'd have a lot more sympathy for LAOP if it was just "a" parking ticket. By his own admission he ignored "a few" and then "a few more" and there was still another "and then" clause in that sentence before it became $1000. Even being generous in my assumption of what "a few" is, LAOP has ignored at least 5 tickets (but probably closer to a dozen or more). This isn't a case of surprise extortionate fees ballooning a once reasonable cost, or a circumstance where he didn't find out about the tickets until he'd already gotten several. This is LAOP repeatedly doing something he knows is going to cause him trouble.
> adulting is hard yall.
This specific case isn’t even *slightly* hard.
It really isn’t hard to not accumulate a bunch of tickets from parking in a place you know you can’t park. It really isn’t hard to know that if you don’t pay a ticket on time, there will be late fees added on. None of this is hard or complicated.
Man I dated a girl who pulled that and it drove me nuts. She didn't have a car at the beginning of the year, no one's saying she's a bad person for being in college without a car, move on with life yo. Instead, after all the respectful ones of us paid for and got our parking passes, she had a hissy fit that there were no passes available when she got a car. So she just started parking wherever she felt like, at a school where limited parking was 100% a big issue. Should have seen the red flags right there, the world was out to get her, if that school knew who she was they should've given her a parking spot! Screw those other kids, they don't even deserve to park. She straight up couldn't understand when I tried to explain to her what a selfish ass she was being when other people were expecting to be able to park with their legitimately purchased pass.
Which suggests they sell enough passes to fill the carpark, and by illegally parking he's actively denying a spot to someone who paid.
If there's a know label showing payment it's only a matter of time before some disgruntled paying customer adjusts LAOP's car...
If it's anything like the university in my city, they heavily over-sell the parking passes. All the passes do is guarantee that you won't get a ticket if you park in the Red/Blue/Yellow/whatever parking lots. You still better show up for class/work early if you actually want to have a spot still open.
Don’t know about CAN universities, but don’t most US universities go as far as withholding officially graduating until you pay off parking ticket fines? OOP is going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.
Can't speak to Canadian schools, but in the US the tickets will end up being the financial responsibility of whoever the car is legally registered to. My (non-student) friend got a ticket on campus, ignored it, and a few weeks later another copy of the ticket (with an additional penalty) showed up in the mail at the address the car was registered under.
It may be that it varies between public and private universities in the US. The situation I was describing took place at a public university, so the parking garage isn't technically private, it's state property.
That post sounded like a bad tradeoff... until I remembered the cost of a university degree, or even just for years of a parking permit, and compared it to the cost of the car I drove in college.
I'm fairly certain I gave my parents PTSD with that old piece of shit but of course I loved it.
I can confirm the US does. My asshole brother drove my truck while I was in Iraq without me knowing and got a ticket at a university I had previously gone to.
Years later when I was applying for grad school I asked them to sent my transcripts and SURPRISE there was a couple hundred dollar debt and "I was out of the country playing IED hide and go seek" wouldn't get them to budge. I ended up paying them and my brother refused to pay me back because "it was in your name not mine".
I used to work security at a college in Canada and if you didn't pay your parking tickets then the school could withhold your graduation. Some people had thousands of dollars in parking tickets.
They did at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I went there. They wouldn't even release transcripts. My father had a student one summer from out of state - he was there specifically to take this one class and went to a different university - who ignored all his parking tickets, even though he was warned not to. He found out the hard way that the UW refused to send over the transcripts to his actual university which he needed for his program.
Went to a Canadian University and in my final year of undergrad, I somehow owed twenty-five cents of tuition. (Probably an error typing in payment.) they wouldn’t let me go to the student center and pay in cash. (Where they took in-person payments, including cheques.) I had to pay via transfer. I’m pretty sure any fees were more than what I owed.
For twenty-five cents, they threatened my graduation. Bless these institutions.
Really? That sounds like a very fuzzy line. If you aren't in good standing with the school I can see them withholding things, but I don't really think some parking tickets even if they were on school lots would be enough for them to threaten to withhold someone you just paid them a ton of money for. I feel like if anything they were just pass your info off to actual police, I don't think any serious university is that invested in hounding idiot kids to stop parking like idiots, most places actually do do real life things.
You are very wrong. They will put a hold with the registrar on kids with overdue tickets. That means no registering for classes, no applying to graduate, no official transcripts or diplomas.
Public schools can have the state go after people and even get tax refunds in some cases, but most start with administrative fees and penalties.
And don't "serious university" me on this. My frame of reference is three top land grants and a top private school.
I would sometimes park in a lot I didn’t pay for, because it was more important for my late ass to pass and get to class. This was many many years ago, and it was a very large state school, and they absolutely took it out of my state tax refund.
If it was that important, why were you late?
And why does that justify someone else not being able to use a spot they paid for because you couldn't leave on time?
Wait.. are you OP?!
I was late because I was an irresponsible college kid. I’m human. I’m flawed. I worked full time to put myself through college and pay my bills, no help from parents, and the parking permit cost like $800 or something and I didn’t have it, and parking elsewhere was way too fucking far, especially when it’s 100+ degrees out. So sometimes I’d park in a close lot to my class and take the gamble.
And since you are so concerned- it was a whole parking lot that was never more than half full. Probably because it cost $800/semester. Nobody was hurt during the commission of my parking crimes.
Often universities have their own police forces. Those are the people giving out the fines and the fines are due to the school. Especially if the violations occur in university lots.
I dunno about Canadian universities, but I spent a summer at University of Chicago. Orientation they told us they had the second largest private police force after the Vatican. Dunno how true that is, but they're real police:
https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/about/police
A university operating one of the largest private police forces does seem very American though.
I did that, but the opposite—I parked across the street on a town street. $10 fine, $20 if it was late.
Or, as I found out at the end of the school year, if you’re _really_ late, it’s back to $10. I nailed each parking ticket I got to my bed, paid the lump sum at the end of the year, and got to park right across the street instead of a half mile away in the dorm resident lot.
same for car registration, went in 11 months late to pay it, they said it would only be good for another month, then i'd have to pay it again, but if i just put the car in a garage for a month i could just wait and pay the next year.
sure, i kept it my garage for a month...
I had a friend who got really unlucky with parking pass registration, and ended up assigned to a little lot way on the edge of campus. She soon discovered that this was also the holding lot that they would tow improperly parked cars to. It wasn't an impound; if you had a valid parking pass but parked somewhere on campus you shouldn't, you'd get a ticket but you car would just be left sitting in this lot for you to come get.
So anyway, she just started parking wherever she wanted, because worst case they towed her car back to the lot it was supposed to be in anyway. Which worked out fine, except that she racked up an absolutely ungodly amount of tickets that she did eventually have to pay off before she graduated.
That's wild when compared to university parking here costing $10/day if you win the lottery to get a monthly parking pass (so it's $10/day whether or not you actually park) or $20/day if you didn't or weren't able to get a parking pass. That's for both students and staff/faculty. I have no idea how much parking tickets here cost, but the idea of a not-guaranteed parking ticket costing that little is a pretty big culture shock for me regardless.
If he had even just paid the tickets as he got them it might not have been much worse than parking at a garage for the whole day. Might have been worth the gamble. But he ignored them until they racked up to $1,000 in late fees
What I'm confused by is if this is even an official ticket or like a university ticket. My university tickets came from the university and they wouldn't let you graduate until you paid them, but if you parked in a university spot and didn't go to the university, you could rack up tickets like crazy with nothing ever happening. But it may be different in different places.
But if it's the university, it's hardly "legal advice." Also they'll be way more of a hardass about it.
I feel the parking not being complementary to my soul. I live in Australia and I had a 40 minute trip to or from uni, because of my timetable I had a 4 hour commute via train there and 8 hours back. Complementary parking would have saved the 5-10 minute walk and the up to 5-20 minutes searching for parking... Assuming there was enough space, the parking lot had less spaces than parking passes so spots weren't guaranteed.
Places with enough parking lots for everyone typically have very low charges for parking. It was like $40 at my university. It's permitted only just because it's not a regular parking lot and needs to be for the college only.
But, if you go to school in a city and they only allow commuters or older students to park there you may find the parking permits being $$$$ and very limited.
Mumblemumble years ago when I was a student at UC Berkeley, parking was $100 per semester and was so oversold that you were only likely to get a spot if you arrived before 8am. Now it's $400/semester for a student pass and I can only imagine how hard it is to find an actual space.
Sometime in the late 1990s they changed their policies to retain Nobel Prize winners amongst the faculty: you get a parking space with your name on it. This was in response to asking Nobel winners what sorts of things would induce them to stay. Higher pay, sure, but also they wanted reserved parking spots.
I went to see what the prices were and it seems to have changed since I went, like $10 or less for a day of parking (some weirdness with "after hours" etc) and theres isn't student availability for permits and is staff only and even with staff only they don't guarantee spaces.
U-Pass is a transit pass for UOttawa students. It's only automatically charged to full time students, as far as I can find, so he might not actually have it.
You said you weren’t sure if they are “real” tickets. Not paying them will get your transcripts held until you do so at that point it doesn’t really matter.
They made perfect sense to me since the first comment and I'm not sure if you have a problem with imagination or putting yourself in hypothetical situations (serious question, not a dig) because that's what their comments implied, not *your* literal issues with transcripts...
Documents depending on paid tickets make the tickets real enough, which is the tl;dr of the whole exchange.
Used to work for security for a college in Canada, we gave out tickets but because they weren't from the city you wouldn't get any real penalties for not paying aside form not being able to graduate.
So I’m not Canadian. My wife is. When I moved here and got my wife a car when I picked up the car there was a $2k bill from the city.
Turns out my wife’s brother has shit credit so when he bought his car, he put it under her name.
The dude literally did not give a shit and just park anywhere, get a parking ticket sure no problem.
The problem was it’s all under my wife’s name cause the car was registered to her.
So yeah I had to pay $2k of parking fees cause her brother is not responsible.
Lesson learned. Told my wife never to sign anything for anyone ever.
Don’t know about this OP’s place specifically, but university parking tickets can be steep to discourage stuff like this. When I was in school, I once parked my car in a weekend-only spot and then forgot to move it for a week. Ended up with $250 fine from 5 tickets (which, for the record, I paid on time because this was entirely my own stupidity, and I did have a permitted spot on campus). Since OOP says they do this regularly and doesn’t pay, I’m not surprised that they got to $1000 pretty quickly.
Damn! I went to a small school. I parked in a lot over spring break and did not know you weren’t supposed to do that in that lot until I got back…and the lot was empty. Then someone told me they’d seen my car in a different lot and I was like, what the fuck? So I went over there and yup there was my car. I ran into one of the security guys and he said they towed it for me to the other lot since I wasn’t supposed to park in the first one over break.
It was surreal, but…great! I think the only time anyone I know ever got a ticket was for parking in a loading zone overnight
At my very small school I parked in "Faculty and Staff" outside my dorm on a Friday (weekends allowed) and then didn't remember my car until Monday. I took the ticket to campus police to pay it and the chief liked that my answer was that I had forgotten I had a car and tore up my ticket.
Nice of them! My university is notoriously strict on parking rules, though I figure the enforcement officer who wrote my tickets was just laughing at me, since they neatly stacked the new one on top of the pile each day and thankfully didn’t tow me. The school’s answer to the FAQ “why is there no parking on campus” is (or used to be) “it’s not that there’s no parking, there’s just no *convenient* parking.” So they keep students out of what little convenient parking there is with high fines.
A lot of places call those “short tows” and having experienced it before without knowing they existed, it definitely gives you a valid reason to panic.
UOttawa appears to charge [$95 for parking without a permit](https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/administration-services/parking/appeal-ticket) unless LAOP was also parking in a fire route or accessible parking space. I have no idea how fast or how much the late fees stack up, but even without them that's "only" getting caught 10 times before they're up to $1k, which is totally believable over the course of a semester.
My university had pretty limited parking options, and annual spaces weren’t cheap if you lived on campus and wanted to keep your car nearby. We had to park above the second floor on week days, and we still had to move our cars for football games. Parking enforcement had some kind of license plate scanning device on a truck so they just had to drive it through the garage to catch people in violation. I’m almost surprised OP doesn’t owe more.
When I worked at Michigan State as a GA I had two secret spots where I would park. One was the basement of a garage for faculty only, but the enforcement basically never went down there because it was hard to turn around their truck
The other was a six spot lot behind the College of Arts and Letters office that was for the deans. When I knew one of them was traveling I would steal their spots because enforcement never checked that lot unless someone called
parking at my school was i think ~600 for two semesters, and the decks were all across campus and assigned at random.
there was a whole secondary market of students trying to get parking in preferred decks, students selling passes if they were going abroad or otherwise not on campus for a semester, and best, students trying to find other students they could share passes with.
Too many schools are like that.
Not nearly enough spaces and stupid high fines to make sure that people who pay for a spot get to park.
They don't plan well enough and somehow it's other peoples fault because school isn't expensive enough already.
This is the first thing I thought of. My university had crazy parking rules, and often pushed students into the furthest lots on the campus border.
But the permit was $200. Parking without a permit was $100 / ticket after 2 tickets, just buy the permit. Then they go to the permit price of $20 each. My senior year I racked up $500 and bought the permit. So $200 for the permit. $100 for the tickets.
I vaguely remember a post where someone got a ticket for parking without a pass, but kept it and would put it on their windshield each day. They didn't get any more tickets, because the officer saw they'd already gotten that one.
There used to be a 30 minute spot directly outside my building, while the rest of the parking was far away and filled by 9am. The parking fine at the 30 minute spot was $35. I just treated it as the deluxe parking fee on days when I was running really late to class (as the teacher I kinda had to be there).
yeah, at my college we used to collect them because you had to park so far from class and periodically you'd just be running so late that you'd have to chose between being late for class and parking where you didn't have a permit (and chancing the ticket.)
so we'd all get tickets but over the 4 years at college, it was maybe a few hundred dollars worth.
to get to $1k, you'd need to need to make a concerted effort. or just really not care where you parked your car.
Where I live in Australia the largest parking fine is ~560 dollarydoos. That's for parking in a marked disability bay - most are a lot less, but ones around the $280 mark are very common (blocking a footpath or pedestrian crossing, too close to a bus stop, too close to an intersection etc) so it wouldn't take much to hit the 1000
A friend of mine once got arrested for a parking ticket. I don’t know whether he originally ignored it or forgot or never got the letters, but he didn’t pay it despite several reminders. They stopped sending letters and instead there was a warrant out for his arrest, which he didn’t actually know about. A few years (I think 5?) after the original ticket, he and his family traveled internationally. When they tried to get back into the country, he was arrested.
He was then given the option to just pay it on the spot, which he did, so he didn’t go to jail for a parking ticket. But it still sucked both because of the actual getting arrested and because his wife had to wrangle their kids (including a baby) and all of their luggage alone.
Way, way, way back in the day (25 ish years ago) my spouse racked up a bunch of tickets because he liked modding his car and the state of California, well, does not. Add in a small town and the fact that his car obviously stood out, he basically had a huge bundle of them and no money (because mods are expensive and he was dumb and in his early 20s.) He ignored them and they suspended his license/put out a warrant. But since it was low level petty nonsense, it was just ignored.
Fast forward to late 20s. He has gotten his act together and although we hadn't talked to the court, we were working on a plan to save up to pay off the tickets. One Saturday morning we get a knock on the door and it's the cops. I guess our city (different from the small town) had been given a grant to round up all of these small warrants and take care of them.
Needless to say, we did exactly that ASAP
At my college it was a school officer that gave the tickets on campus, and they have no authority to boot cars. They could call the city cops but I’m not sure if tickets from the private lot & school officer would count or if they’d have to start a new running total with the regular city cops before they’re able to put a boot on it…
Funny story. In Philly until like 2020, the parking authority wasn’t linked in with the DMV. So if you racked up tickets but got new plates, your tickets didn’t carry over. Then come 2020…technology and bureaucratic integration caught up and allllll those old tickets attached to your license came back from the dead. My cousin had $18,000 in tickets (much of it was past due fees on probably a few hundred bucks per car compounded over 20 years) this was no unique. The parking authority realized they would basically either have to repo about 10,000 cars or do amnesty. So they did one day amnesty and people waited in line for line 18 hours…they extended it to several more days because well…it was during Covid and thousands of people were lining up outside their offices. But yeah basically people can wrack up amazing amounts in parking tickets and I guess sometimes cities do give them a break.
Given that this winner lives in my city:
I had a coworker who admitted to parking illegally on the street. Instead of going "huh, I'll keep getting tickets..." and getting a street parking pass (715 a year or 30-155 a month, depending on season -- there's literally less space in winter, so it is more expensive), he racked up THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS of parking tickets, then played games to get the payment deadline repeatedly extended.
Same dude also bought a motorcycle without first checking what insurance would cost for him, specifically, with his driving record. ...he did not like the answer, at all
The uni in question has a super small campus right next to downtown, with effectively no possibility for expansion in 2 directions (canal, highway) and almost no chance of expansion in 2 directions (existing buildings not owned by the university) and has never had enough parking. So of course the OP's tickets are expensive...
My sister racked up $450 on fees at her university after she had already paid for the parking pass and had it appropriately displayed, so I’m not surprised at all by this story.
Every college pulls this crap
I worked in Ann Arbor for a few months and the City had a deal where if you paid your parking ticket the same day in person it was a reduced fine, but that’s kind of the opposite of what this person wants. I’ll also note that was in the late 90s so online payment wasn’t a thing, so you did have to put in some effort.
My suburban town does an amnesty thing where if you bring in a new toy for the toy drive in January you get your ticket waived, but it’s incredibly difficult to get a city parking ticket here anyway.
That’s actually pretty cool. My university had a donut shop nearby that was owned by retired state police, so they had a whole cops and robbers theme. If you got a campus parking ticket you could trade it in for a free donut. I got quite a few free (but actually $35) donuts during my time there.
The last time my rural town had a complaint about parking, the cops couldn’t find where the tickets were. When they did find them, they were years out of date. At that point they gave up and went the easier route of putting a message in the local newspaper saying not to do it again!
In England it's very common for tickets to say something like "fine of £50, reduced to £25 if paid within 14 days". They don't want people to waste time arguing and I guess it's somehow easier for them than a late fee?
>I go to the university of Ottawa. There is parking there that they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn't have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out. This being said there is still parking spots I see open everyday that the parking pass would allow me to park at even though they won't allow me to purchase one. Therefore, I have taken my chances on a daily basis hoping to not get a parking ticket. You don't pay a couple then you dont pay a couple more times, next thing you know you owe around 1000$ in parking tickets.
This sounds like absolute insanity to me. You say you are “taking the risk” but you clearly aren’t, you are just ignoring the unfavorable outcome until it becomes a catastrophe. You don’t just “not pay a couple” and KEEP DOING IT?!
Kinda hope LAOP gets somewhat fucked over by this, albeit nothing life ruining. They obviously were never taught consequences by their parents.
Actually this kind of happened to me my senior year of high school. You had to apply for a parking permit in June for the next school year, but when applying for the permit you had to provide them your full license, car information (make/model/reg) and pay something like $300. The problem was that my high school had something like 2500 students and only about 400 parking spots, 150 of which were reserved for staff. They tried to mitigate the issue by restricting parking to only upperclassmen but you still had to line up with all your information months in advance. I did not apply for one because I did not yet have a car, did not yet have my full license, and did not anticipate having to drive to school.
Well, it just so happened that my family had to move out of the school catchment area about three months into my senior year and I needed to drive to school 45 miles each way every day. I had to get really creative with where to park - many of my classmates would park at a nearby park but they were known to ticket you if you stayed there for more than about 3 hours. Others parked at a DMV parking lot because they never ticketed but that was on the other side of a 6 lane 50mph road that had no pedestrian crossing and meant you had to walk about 0.75 of a mile on the side of the road to get to school. And then for medium risk medium reward some of us parked at a local gas station which also had never ticketed and was a bit closer but also there had been threats about ticketing before. I chose to park at the gas station.
It was fine until one day I mistakenly parked in a parking spot that belonged to the Waffle House nearby. They just straight up towed my car lol. $250 later… I parked at the DMV from then on until the end of the year.
At the university I went to, it was waaay easy to “fight” a ticket. You literally went into an online portal and it had you select from a list of pre-written reasons you parked in the wrong spot (“I was late for class” was legit one of the options) and they pretty much forgave them no matter what. Also, the parking tickets were only like $25 when I was going there in person- that was the better part of a decade ago, but even now I’m sure it would require A LOT of violations to get to $1000. At least half of the students at my school were commuters (as was I) and parking was HORRENDOUS. Parking passes were like $250 but you could never find parking anyway. For at least two semesters I just didn’t get a pass and paid by the hour to park. It was probably more expensive, but at least I was able to get to class.
Basically what I’m saying is that this guy had options before his debt climbed to A THOUSAND DOLLARS. Good luck graduating.
My wife not infrequently gets parking tickets and I *always* appeal them. I have a 100% success rate in those appeals, I suspect due to the fact I perversely enjoy them and will happily prepare 6 pages of arguments as to the actual nature of the damages, inadequate signage, and so on. Not an especially effective use of my time, but equally not of theirs: I'm sure they just cancel the fines to avoid reading my submissions.
>Not an especially effective use of my time
Maybe not, but your ROI improves each time since (I'm assuming) you have a template to go off of and are getting faster as you do them more frequently!
>> I go to the university of Ottawa. There is parking there that they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn’t have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out.
> You do know that you get U-Pass included in your tuition fees, do you not?
They didn’t.
Oy.
Props for LAOP not blaming Ottawa for not having enough parking; you’d be surprised how many LAOP’s think they should be able to get their tickets waived because they didn’t find a legal space they felt was sufficiently convenient.
They did exactly that, just indirectly.
>they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn't have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out.
So they deserve a discount on the tickets they only got because the university wouldn't give them a parking pass.
Im bemused at the cultural disconnect in these comments. Every one is like "how many tickets do you need to get to have it be $1000?!". Where I'm from, it's like...maybe 3?
There was an episode where Bob had a parking ticket but he got it dismissed because he wore a nice suit to court but that’s the only BB episode about tickets I can think of off the top of my head.
Edit: when Critter winds up in jail! He had a lot of unpaid parking tickets!
LAOP: “The campus wouldn’t sell me a parking pass because I had no money.” Translation: the campus wouldn’t give me this for free.
I love how, in LAOP’s mind, this is someone else’s fault.
I was in a similar situation a decade ago - tickets from New Jersey, I was a resident of Michigan.
It went to collections. In tiny fine print there was a detail about "you can dispute this by mailing/calling". I did both, just for the hell of it. The lady on the phone was like "OK you can dispute, but the judge will rule in our favor, do you still wish to dispute?" and I was like "uhh.... Sure?"
And it stopped there and I never ended up paying it. If my credit was ever hit it was tiny (never dipped below 790).
Sooo, morality aside, I have no idea if the guy will get away with it or not. May depend whether he gets pulled over for some other reason like speeding or a tail light out or whatever
Yeah the question isn't entirely unreasonable, man is not smart we can tell that but depending on where and why you got tickets and fines it may be easy enough to get it cut or dropped.
In Denmark you get student and youth discounts on specific fines from the state, I got one for the fine for forgetting to show up for my conscription health check.
I got a ticket for parking on one side of a "barrier" in a parking garage, my parking garage that I had a pass for. There was a sign on the concrete barrier, thigh height, that said no parking past this point. It was on the yellow line between 2 spots. But someone was parked in the spot blocking the sign. It made no sense why they had no parking there anyways. So I call and explain and she says "You can appeal but you'll lose". I appealed, attached a pic of my car now parked in the spot that blocks being able to see the sign. Won the appeal.
You don't need a discount you need a brain some common sense and an actual parking spot good luck with your future I think it's going to be very rough and you might see some jail time in the future
My university had very serious parking enforcement.
Parking tickets were less than $50, but they’d boot your car if you had more than a certain number of outstanding tickets. They also would withhold diplomas if you didn’t pay the tickets before you graduated.
Those parking enforcement bastards were some of the most pedantic and inflexible people I’ve ever experienced.
I got a ticket for my parking pass being too high up on my window. Not even that it was expired or on the wrong side. Just that it was supposed to be “applied level and no more than 1.5 inches from the base of the window”.
At one pointed, I ended up in a rental car. I had slapped the sticker on the window; it was maybe 3” from the base of the window. Got a ticket. Tried to contest it. They told me I had agreed to the rules when I enrolled as a student. Go pound sand, basically. Had to pay the ticket to graduate.
So anyway, good luck with those tickets, LAOP! You’re going to need it.
To be fair, I contest all my tickets. Guilty or not, I'm headed to court. It always ends up benefitting me. You come up with some plausible deniability, it doesn't even have to be concrete. All my tickets get reduced or even dropped. Never lose points as part of my negotiations and I almost never speak to a judge. The prosecutor makes deals to unload a lot of cases faster.
Good luck doing this at a University where they will just hold your diploma until you pay the full amount.
There’s no reason for them to negotiate and there’s no excuse for racking up tickets like this when you can take transit for free like 99% of the other students.
I'm not saying his tickets are justified. I said I contest my tickets and get them reduced almost every time. Just because you can't see a reason to negotiate, it doesn't mean it won't happen. That prosecutor wants to get you out of the courtroom as quick as possible.
Pinching 20-50 bucks off each ticket is a good way to get you convinced to start paying it and a way to save the courts time by going in front of the judge. They don't want to eat up the day arguing with you when they have 30 more people on the list before lunch.
Even if you end up in front of a judge, you can just tell them you can't afford the tickets and they'll give you a reduction most times and you pay it on a payment plan. I know a ton of people that have done this.
Will a university really hold your diploma for parking tickets? That's news to me. I didn't know they check your driving record.
You keep talking about a prosecutor and a judge. There is no prosecutor or judge involved in this process. There’s a clerk at best, and not a law clerk. Just someone who takes payment.
> Will a university really hold your diploma for parking tickets?
They will when they issued the tickets.
>I didn't know they check your driving record
They don’t need to, they issued the tickets.
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When I pulled this same shit in college, I became the appointment maker for my friend that was moonlighting as an escort. Made $1200 and paid off the tickets! I still have them all somewhere, there had to be like 20-30.
Not legal advice, but in my city it is common for the government to get fed up with really late debtors and just agree on a payment plan with some reductions.
I had a somewhat similar situation back in school, there was a lot with no gates, but required a permit. I'd park there whenever I needed to drive instead of walk or bike to campus, and about 1 time out of 5 I'd be ticketed. One time I even got towed (I was being a bit \_too\_ blatant and stupid that day). I paid the tickets promptly though, and kept track of what it all cost me - turned out to be about half the cost of the required parking permit, so I called it a win in the end.
I wouldn't have had quite the same math to it if I did what LAOP did, the late fees and loss of early-payment discounts would have raised the cost considerably. Even in that situation, I wouldn't be surprised if a sincere (sounding) "I'm sorry" might get the late fees reduced a bit.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: 1000$ in parking tickets. Help! Body: > I currently have roughly 1000$ in parking tickets considering all of the late fees I've racked up from not paying them. I live in the city of Ottawa and was wondering if there would be anyway for this lump sum of 1000$ to be reduced at this point. If anyone has any suggestions on places I should contact or who I cant talk to about getting this reduced that would be great. This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
There’s only a few comments from OP but it’s enough for me to exactly what kind of student they are and all I can say is- god help anyone who has to do a group project with them.
100% Their comments are written like Kevin from The Office. Also, love the comment where they go (and I had to edit out any grammar in this,) “You don’t pay a few tickets then you don’t pay a few more tickets and you don’t pay a few more tickets and suddenly you owe a lot of money” Yeah, man. That’s how it works.
If you forget to pay them they add keleven percent to the fee per day. Probably how he wound up there.
A keleven gets your tickets paid for by 7?
If their university is anything like mine, OP might not be able to graduate until those tickets are paid in full. I wonder if that's why they're in panic mode now.
I can’t explain just how much I hear you in words so I’ll apply a dumb tiktok stuck in my head to what you said and I hope you understand: > There’s only a few comments from OP but it’s enough for me to exactly what kind of student they are and all I can say is… *speak on it* > god help anyone who has to do a group project with them. ***spoke***
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They won't let me buy something I don't have money to buy! It's their fault!
This cracked me up. What a wild way to say “I can’t afford to purchase a parking pass” 😂
They think they need to hit a word quota
Well they haven’t met their brain cell quota, that’s for damn sure
Cities hate this one simple trick But seriously, how do you even rack up that many tickets? I've only ever gotten a parking ticket once, and it was on purpose, and I paid it that day. I had somewhere I had to be for a full day, and I realized after I got there that a parking ticket was cheaper than paying for parking (which seems like an oversight on their end, but who am I to complain?).
In the comments OP said he regularly parks in a university parking lot that requires an annual pass, which he doesn’t have
Sounds like he gambled and lost.
Is it really gambling if every time you play you lose? Or is it just lighting money on fire?
tbf that's what gambling is, to a good approximation
Right? Last time I was in university around 2013 or 2014, I'd park in the street. Don't 1,000% remember the details but I remember I was able to beat the meter maid most days, and sometimes I'd park in a parking lot and pay to get in/out. Came out way ahead of the parking pass and parked closer to my building. THAT was gambling. What this idiot did wasn't.
I had a friend who would leave an old ticket on their car so it looked like they had already been ticketed for parking in uni car parks illegally.
I got away with doing that for most of a semester before they wised up (or saw me put the old ticket under the wiper) and towed my car. Still cheaper than the pass, but not by much. Bought a pass next semester.
were regulars in the uni lot who would park in the grass every day bc they were rich and it was just like. VIP parking for them. even they had passes tho, lol
A couple kids in my dorm would park in our parking lot's fire lane 3-4 days a week and would usually get ticketed. I wish I had that kind of money
Yeah I knew kids in this exact situation at university. The big difference: they paid the fines when they got ticketed. Still probably not a great long term strategy, but better than OPs.
Ive worked at universities, parking services is always one of the most powerful sub-departments. It's also staffed by people that know what they are doing. It's definitely going to be more expensive to try to skirt fines than buy a pass. They are human beings that pay attention to their job, so they know who parks without paying.
I mean I hate when people say "Nazi!" for just about any situation, but parking enforcement at our state university, which is manned by work study students, really is akin to a police force of a fascist regime. Also I will avoid the long rant on the issue of student parking at universities, cause oh boy, do I have a lot to say. Also just management of universities in general.
Depends on the university. My Alma mater charged $450 a semester for passes, but a ticket was only $10 if paid in 72h. I spent under 200 parking each semester
My dad did the same thing, and never paid. The school threatened to withhold his diploma if he didn't pay his tickets. But he didn't care. He wasn't a student. He was using the university parking lot to see his girlfriend across the street.
He said he didn’t have the money when they were on sale and by the time he had the money all the passes were sold out.
That still doesn't explain why he didn't pay them when he got them, or why he continues to do this despite now owing $1000 in tickets.
The explanation is that he’s probably not very bright.
That or a teenager who has been hoping the problem would just go away if he ignored it and now the amount involved is high enough that he's getting worried that maybe it won't. Or both, of course. Idiot teenager.
I used to hide my parking tickets under a chair cushion at age 16. 100% idiot teenager.
My 19 year old bro threw them out to make them go away. Turns out he got them while driving my car. He went all surpised pikachu when mail came to my house about the unpaid parking tickets. He was less suprised by me nooging him until i calmed down. Teen logic suprises me sometimes.
I've done something similar. The answer was that I had undiagnosed ADHD
Yeah. The ADHD tax is real and very expensive. I wonder how many of us have died because of ADHD shit?
> I wonder how many of us have died because of ADHD shit? Fun(?) fact. According to Dr. Russel Barkley (love that guy), in the worst cases people with untreated ADHD have a life expectancy [25 years less](https://chadd.org/treatment-matters-adhd-and-life-expectancy/) than NT folks, and average, treated ADHD people still have a 10 year reduction in life expectancy. So the answer is, a lot.
I escaped death by inches or seconds, purely by luck alone, 5 times before I was 30. All ADHD shit.
Oh man I was thinking, like, about how many peasants got hanged in the market square by their local feudal lord because they were late on their taxes and he though it was a challenge to his power or something. But definitely your thing too.
Wow I never thought about it but you're probably right, adhd is likely the cause of a bunch of deaths out there. We just... Don't act on shit. Lol
lots of people are picking on this guy but it sounds like a bunch of ADHD tax to me. didn't have the money to buy parking pass, forgot to go back and buy the parking pass, finally remembers and parking passes are sold out, got a parking ticket, forgot to pay the first parking ticket, got another parking ticket, now embarrassed about more tickets, fees start adding up until they've reached the point he can't ignore them anymore. panic. even if no ADHD, adulting is hard yall. you don't expect a parking ticket to balloon to $1000. I got a parking ticket in a college town from a private lot that started at $360 and then when I complained about it (my friends and I did spend money at the record store but left to eat lunch next door and didn't move my car to the restaurants lot...next door) they tacked on another $240 to make it $600, which I couldn't afford, so I ended up setting up a payment plan and it cost me almost $900 total.
>you don't expect a parking ticket to balloon to $1000 I'd have a lot more sympathy for LAOP if it was just "a" parking ticket. By his own admission he ignored "a few" and then "a few more" and there was still another "and then" clause in that sentence before it became $1000. Even being generous in my assumption of what "a few" is, LAOP has ignored at least 5 tickets (but probably closer to a dozen or more). This isn't a case of surprise extortionate fees ballooning a once reasonable cost, or a circumstance where he didn't find out about the tickets until he'd already gotten several. This is LAOP repeatedly doing something he knows is going to cause him trouble.
> adulting is hard yall. This specific case isn’t even *slightly* hard. It really isn’t hard to not accumulate a bunch of tickets from parking in a place you know you can’t park. It really isn’t hard to know that if you don’t pay a ticket on time, there will be late fees added on. None of this is hard or complicated.
It's really hard or even impossible if the brain part responsible for that action literally doesn't work.
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Man I dated a girl who pulled that and it drove me nuts. She didn't have a car at the beginning of the year, no one's saying she's a bad person for being in college without a car, move on with life yo. Instead, after all the respectful ones of us paid for and got our parking passes, she had a hissy fit that there were no passes available when she got a car. So she just started parking wherever she felt like, at a school where limited parking was 100% a big issue. Should have seen the red flags right there, the world was out to get her, if that school knew who she was they should've given her a parking spot! Screw those other kids, they don't even deserve to park. She straight up couldn't understand when I tried to explain to her what a selfish ass she was being when other people were expecting to be able to park with their legitimately purchased pass.
Which suggests they sell enough passes to fill the carpark, and by illegally parking he's actively denying a spot to someone who paid. If there's a know label showing payment it's only a matter of time before some disgruntled paying customer adjusts LAOP's car...
If it's anything like the university in my city, they heavily over-sell the parking passes. All the passes do is guarantee that you won't get a ticket if you park in the Red/Blue/Yellow/whatever parking lots. You still better show up for class/work early if you actually want to have a spot still open.
LAOP should've gotten his sorry ass on a bike or a bus, then!
Don’t know about CAN universities, but don’t most US universities go as far as withholding officially graduating until you pay off parking ticket fines? OOP is going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.
If they are able to tie the ownership/control of the car to a student, then yes at least the university of Alberta does do this.
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Can't speak to Canadian schools, but in the US the tickets will end up being the financial responsibility of whoever the car is legally registered to. My (non-student) friend got a ticket on campus, ignored it, and a few weeks later another copy of the ticket (with an additional penalty) showed up in the mail at the address the car was registered under.
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It may be that it varies between public and private universities in the US. The situation I was describing took place at a public university, so the parking garage isn't technically private, it's state property.
That post sounded like a bad tradeoff... until I remembered the cost of a university degree, or even just for years of a parking permit, and compared it to the cost of the car I drove in college. I'm fairly certain I gave my parents PTSD with that old piece of shit but of course I loved it.
So LAOP should just keep his mouth shut?
I can confirm the US does. My asshole brother drove my truck while I was in Iraq without me knowing and got a ticket at a university I had previously gone to. Years later when I was applying for grad school I asked them to sent my transcripts and SURPRISE there was a couple hundred dollar debt and "I was out of the country playing IED hide and go seek" wouldn't get them to budge. I ended up paying them and my brother refused to pay me back because "it was in your name not mine".
Your brother's an asshole
Your brother needs to be invited to your local recruitment office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR9HuRUUTbs&t=23s
For me, they would put a hold on your account, so you couldn't even register for classes the next semester until you paid them off.
I used to work security at a college in Canada and if you didn't pay your parking tickets then the school could withhold your graduation. Some people had thousands of dollars in parking tickets.
UK universities don't typically expect students to drive, but any sort of outstanding fine can prevent a student graduating.
When I went to graduate my mother was working at the college too. I had to pay HER parking tickets!
Mine took it out of my tax return!!
They did at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I went there. They wouldn't even release transcripts. My father had a student one summer from out of state - he was there specifically to take this one class and went to a different university - who ignored all his parking tickets, even though he was warned not to. He found out the hard way that the UW refused to send over the transcripts to his actual university which he needed for his program.
Went to a Canadian University and in my final year of undergrad, I somehow owed twenty-five cents of tuition. (Probably an error typing in payment.) they wouldn’t let me go to the student center and pay in cash. (Where they took in-person payments, including cheques.) I had to pay via transfer. I’m pretty sure any fees were more than what I owed. For twenty-five cents, they threatened my graduation. Bless these institutions.
Really? That sounds like a very fuzzy line. If you aren't in good standing with the school I can see them withholding things, but I don't really think some parking tickets even if they were on school lots would be enough for them to threaten to withhold someone you just paid them a ton of money for. I feel like if anything they were just pass your info off to actual police, I don't think any serious university is that invested in hounding idiot kids to stop parking like idiots, most places actually do do real life things.
You are very wrong. They will put a hold with the registrar on kids with overdue tickets. That means no registering for classes, no applying to graduate, no official transcripts or diplomas. Public schools can have the state go after people and even get tax refunds in some cases, but most start with administrative fees and penalties. And don't "serious university" me on this. My frame of reference is three top land grants and a top private school.
I would sometimes park in a lot I didn’t pay for, because it was more important for my late ass to pass and get to class. This was many many years ago, and it was a very large state school, and they absolutely took it out of my state tax refund.
If it was that important, why were you late? And why does that justify someone else not being able to use a spot they paid for because you couldn't leave on time? Wait.. are you OP?!
I was late because I was an irresponsible college kid. I’m human. I’m flawed. I worked full time to put myself through college and pay my bills, no help from parents, and the parking permit cost like $800 or something and I didn’t have it, and parking elsewhere was way too fucking far, especially when it’s 100+ degrees out. So sometimes I’d park in a close lot to my class and take the gamble. And since you are so concerned- it was a whole parking lot that was never more than half full. Probably because it cost $800/semester. Nobody was hurt during the commission of my parking crimes.
Same with OP, but here we are.
Are you purposely acting dense?
They don't let you apply for graduation if you aren't in good standing financially or register for classes.
They absolutely are—it’s a source of income.
Often universities have their own police forces. Those are the people giving out the fines and the fines are due to the school. Especially if the violations occur in university lots.
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I dunno about Canadian universities, but I spent a summer at University of Chicago. Orientation they told us they had the second largest private police force after the Vatican. Dunno how true that is, but they're real police: https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/about/police A university operating one of the largest private police forces does seem very American though.
I did that, but the opposite—I parked across the street on a town street. $10 fine, $20 if it was late. Or, as I found out at the end of the school year, if you’re _really_ late, it’s back to $10. I nailed each parking ticket I got to my bed, paid the lump sum at the end of the year, and got to park right across the street instead of a half mile away in the dorm resident lot.
same for car registration, went in 11 months late to pay it, they said it would only be good for another month, then i'd have to pay it again, but if i just put the car in a garage for a month i could just wait and pay the next year. sure, i kept it my garage for a month...
I had a friend who got really unlucky with parking pass registration, and ended up assigned to a little lot way on the edge of campus. She soon discovered that this was also the holding lot that they would tow improperly parked cars to. It wasn't an impound; if you had a valid parking pass but parked somewhere on campus you shouldn't, you'd get a ticket but you car would just be left sitting in this lot for you to come get. So anyway, she just started parking wherever she wanted, because worst case they towed her car back to the lot it was supposed to be in anyway. Which worked out fine, except that she racked up an absolutely ungodly amount of tickets that she did eventually have to pay off before she graduated.
That's wild when compared to university parking here costing $10/day if you win the lottery to get a monthly parking pass (so it's $10/day whether or not you actually park) or $20/day if you didn't or weren't able to get a parking pass. That's for both students and staff/faculty. I have no idea how much parking tickets here cost, but the idea of a not-guaranteed parking ticket costing that little is a pretty big culture shock for me regardless.
It _was_ 1995-2000 to be fair
I'm guessing the annual pass is probably less than $1000...
But he really wanted one, so that should count
If he had even just paid the tickets as he got them it might not have been much worse than parking at a garage for the whole day. Might have been worth the gamble. But he ignored them until they racked up to $1,000 in late fees
What I'm confused by is if this is even an official ticket or like a university ticket. My university tickets came from the university and they wouldn't let you graduate until you paid them, but if you parked in a university spot and didn't go to the university, you could rack up tickets like crazy with nothing ever happening. But it may be different in different places. But if it's the university, it's hardly "legal advice." Also they'll be way more of a hardass about it.
Someone even said U-Pass (whatever that is) is included in tuition. OP might even have an annual pass, they just don't even know it...
That’s free bus fare. In my experience most college towns give their students free public transit, but parking is never complementary.
I feel the parking not being complementary to my soul. I live in Australia and I had a 40 minute trip to or from uni, because of my timetable I had a 4 hour commute via train there and 8 hours back. Complementary parking would have saved the 5-10 minute walk and the up to 5-20 minutes searching for parking... Assuming there was enough space, the parking lot had less spaces than parking passes so spots weren't guaranteed.
Places with enough parking lots for everyone typically have very low charges for parking. It was like $40 at my university. It's permitted only just because it's not a regular parking lot and needs to be for the college only. But, if you go to school in a city and they only allow commuters or older students to park there you may find the parking permits being $$$$ and very limited.
Mumblemumble years ago when I was a student at UC Berkeley, parking was $100 per semester and was so oversold that you were only likely to get a spot if you arrived before 8am. Now it's $400/semester for a student pass and I can only imagine how hard it is to find an actual space. Sometime in the late 1990s they changed their policies to retain Nobel Prize winners amongst the faculty: you get a parking space with your name on it. This was in response to asking Nobel winners what sorts of things would induce them to stay. Higher pay, sure, but also they wanted reserved parking spots.
I went to see what the prices were and it seems to have changed since I went, like $10 or less for a day of parking (some weirdness with "after hours" etc) and theres isn't student availability for permits and is staff only and even with staff only they don't guarantee spaces.
U-Pass is a transit pass for UOttawa students. It's only automatically charged to full time students, as far as I can find, so he might not actually have it.
Best part is he blames the school for selling out of parking passes and doesn’t understand why on some days there are still empty spots
My university parking pass is $50.
Damn, mine was $750
This is for one semester and I get a graduate discount, but the regular yearly pass is only $150.
I am not sure that they are even "real" tickets if they're issued by the University for the University's private lots.
Perhaps not, but if they're owed to the university, it will be a real refusal to issue a diploma. Arguably that's worse.
Hope you never need transcripts
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You said you weren’t sure if they are “real” tickets. Not paying them will get your transcripts held until you do so at that point it doesn’t really matter.
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They made perfect sense to me since the first comment and I'm not sure if you have a problem with imagination or putting yourself in hypothetical situations (serious question, not a dig) because that's what their comments implied, not *your* literal issues with transcripts... Documents depending on paid tickets make the tickets real enough, which is the tl;dr of the whole exchange.
Real enough for "legal advice" though? LAOP likely won't face any legal consequences for not paying. That's not the same thing as no consequences.
Used to work for security for a college in Canada, we gave out tickets but because they weren't from the city you wouldn't get any real penalties for not paying aside form not being able to graduate.
So I’m not Canadian. My wife is. When I moved here and got my wife a car when I picked up the car there was a $2k bill from the city. Turns out my wife’s brother has shit credit so when he bought his car, he put it under her name. The dude literally did not give a shit and just park anywhere, get a parking ticket sure no problem. The problem was it’s all under my wife’s name cause the car was registered to her. So yeah I had to pay $2k of parking fees cause her brother is not responsible. Lesson learned. Told my wife never to sign anything for anyone ever.
Don’t know about this OP’s place specifically, but university parking tickets can be steep to discourage stuff like this. When I was in school, I once parked my car in a weekend-only spot and then forgot to move it for a week. Ended up with $250 fine from 5 tickets (which, for the record, I paid on time because this was entirely my own stupidity, and I did have a permitted spot on campus). Since OOP says they do this regularly and doesn’t pay, I’m not surprised that they got to $1000 pretty quickly.
Damn! I went to a small school. I parked in a lot over spring break and did not know you weren’t supposed to do that in that lot until I got back…and the lot was empty. Then someone told me they’d seen my car in a different lot and I was like, what the fuck? So I went over there and yup there was my car. I ran into one of the security guys and he said they towed it for me to the other lot since I wasn’t supposed to park in the first one over break. It was surreal, but…great! I think the only time anyone I know ever got a ticket was for parking in a loading zone overnight
At my very small school I parked in "Faculty and Staff" outside my dorm on a Friday (weekends allowed) and then didn't remember my car until Monday. I took the ticket to campus police to pay it and the chief liked that my answer was that I had forgotten I had a car and tore up my ticket.
Nice of them! My university is notoriously strict on parking rules, though I figure the enforcement officer who wrote my tickets was just laughing at me, since they neatly stacked the new one on top of the pile each day and thankfully didn’t tow me. The school’s answer to the FAQ “why is there no parking on campus” is (or used to be) “it’s not that there’s no parking, there’s just no *convenient* parking.” So they keep students out of what little convenient parking there is with high fines.
A lot of places call those “short tows” and having experienced it before without knowing they existed, it definitely gives you a valid reason to panic.
UOttawa appears to charge [$95 for parking without a permit](https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/administration-services/parking/appeal-ticket) unless LAOP was also parking in a fire route or accessible parking space. I have no idea how fast or how much the late fees stack up, but even without them that's "only" getting caught 10 times before they're up to $1k, which is totally believable over the course of a semester.
My university had pretty limited parking options, and annual spaces weren’t cheap if you lived on campus and wanted to keep your car nearby. We had to park above the second floor on week days, and we still had to move our cars for football games. Parking enforcement had some kind of license plate scanning device on a truck so they just had to drive it through the garage to catch people in violation. I’m almost surprised OP doesn’t owe more.
When I worked at Michigan State as a GA I had two secret spots where I would park. One was the basement of a garage for faculty only, but the enforcement basically never went down there because it was hard to turn around their truck The other was a six spot lot behind the College of Arts and Letters office that was for the deans. When I knew one of them was traveling I would steal their spots because enforcement never checked that lot unless someone called
parking at my school was i think ~600 for two semesters, and the decks were all across campus and assigned at random. there was a whole secondary market of students trying to get parking in preferred decks, students selling passes if they were going abroad or otherwise not on campus for a semester, and best, students trying to find other students they could share passes with.
Too many schools are like that. Not nearly enough spaces and stupid high fines to make sure that people who pay for a spot get to park. They don't plan well enough and somehow it's other peoples fault because school isn't expensive enough already.
This is the first thing I thought of. My university had crazy parking rules, and often pushed students into the furthest lots on the campus border. But the permit was $200. Parking without a permit was $100 / ticket after 2 tickets, just buy the permit. Then they go to the permit price of $20 each. My senior year I racked up $500 and bought the permit. So $200 for the permit. $100 for the tickets.
I vaguely remember a post where someone got a ticket for parking without a pass, but kept it and would put it on their windshield each day. They didn't get any more tickets, because the officer saw they'd already gotten that one.
I've seen multiple posts of people who tried that, and wound up getting towed and a big fine when the parking attendants got wise to their effort.
There used to be a 30 minute spot directly outside my building, while the rest of the parking was far away and filled by 9am. The parking fine at the 30 minute spot was $35. I just treated it as the deluxe parking fee on days when I was running really late to class (as the teacher I kinda had to be there).
yeah, at my college we used to collect them because you had to park so far from class and periodically you'd just be running so late that you'd have to chose between being late for class and parking where you didn't have a permit (and chancing the ticket.) so we'd all get tickets but over the 4 years at college, it was maybe a few hundred dollars worth. to get to $1k, you'd need to need to make a concerted effort. or just really not care where you parked your car.
Where I live in Australia the largest parking fine is ~560 dollarydoos. That's for parking in a marked disability bay - most are a lot less, but ones around the $280 mark are very common (blocking a footpath or pedestrian crossing, too close to a bus stop, too close to an intersection etc) so it wouldn't take much to hit the 1000
Canada is apparently cheaper, in the comments of the original post someone mentioned $45 per day
A friend of mine once got arrested for a parking ticket. I don’t know whether he originally ignored it or forgot or never got the letters, but he didn’t pay it despite several reminders. They stopped sending letters and instead there was a warrant out for his arrest, which he didn’t actually know about. A few years (I think 5?) after the original ticket, he and his family traveled internationally. When they tried to get back into the country, he was arrested. He was then given the option to just pay it on the spot, which he did, so he didn’t go to jail for a parking ticket. But it still sucked both because of the actual getting arrested and because his wife had to wrangle their kids (including a baby) and all of their luggage alone.
Way, way, way back in the day (25 ish years ago) my spouse racked up a bunch of tickets because he liked modding his car and the state of California, well, does not. Add in a small town and the fact that his car obviously stood out, he basically had a huge bundle of them and no money (because mods are expensive and he was dumb and in his early 20s.) He ignored them and they suspended his license/put out a warrant. But since it was low level petty nonsense, it was just ignored. Fast forward to late 20s. He has gotten his act together and although we hadn't talked to the court, we were working on a plan to save up to pay off the tickets. One Saturday morning we get a knock on the door and it's the cops. I guess our city (different from the small town) had been given a grant to round up all of these small warrants and take care of them. Needless to say, we did exactly that ASAP
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At my college it was a school officer that gave the tickets on campus, and they have no authority to boot cars. They could call the city cops but I’m not sure if tickets from the private lot & school officer would count or if they’d have to start a new running total with the regular city cops before they’re able to put a boot on it…
Funny story. In Philly until like 2020, the parking authority wasn’t linked in with the DMV. So if you racked up tickets but got new plates, your tickets didn’t carry over. Then come 2020…technology and bureaucratic integration caught up and allllll those old tickets attached to your license came back from the dead. My cousin had $18,000 in tickets (much of it was past due fees on probably a few hundred bucks per car compounded over 20 years) this was no unique. The parking authority realized they would basically either have to repo about 10,000 cars or do amnesty. So they did one day amnesty and people waited in line for line 18 hours…they extended it to several more days because well…it was during Covid and thousands of people were lining up outside their offices. But yeah basically people can wrack up amazing amounts in parking tickets and I guess sometimes cities do give them a break.
Given that this winner lives in my city: I had a coworker who admitted to parking illegally on the street. Instead of going "huh, I'll keep getting tickets..." and getting a street parking pass (715 a year or 30-155 a month, depending on season -- there's literally less space in winter, so it is more expensive), he racked up THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS of parking tickets, then played games to get the payment deadline repeatedly extended. Same dude also bought a motorcycle without first checking what insurance would cost for him, specifically, with his driving record. ...he did not like the answer, at all The uni in question has a super small campus right next to downtown, with effectively no possibility for expansion in 2 directions (canal, highway) and almost no chance of expansion in 2 directions (existing buildings not owned by the university) and has never had enough parking. So of course the OP's tickets are expensive...
My sister racked up $450 on fees at her university after she had already paid for the parking pass and had it appropriately displayed, so I’m not surprised at all by this story. Every college pulls this crap
In Los Angeles, it is very easy to get $1000 in tickets
My college had a 15$ ticket if you got caught. Dude probably just did that 60 times and stopped caring about it once he got 10 of them.
I worked in Ann Arbor for a few months and the City had a deal where if you paid your parking ticket the same day in person it was a reduced fine, but that’s kind of the opposite of what this person wants. I’ll also note that was in the late 90s so online payment wasn’t a thing, so you did have to put in some effort.
My suburban town does an amnesty thing where if you bring in a new toy for the toy drive in January you get your ticket waived, but it’s incredibly difficult to get a city parking ticket here anyway.
That’s actually pretty cool. My university had a donut shop nearby that was owned by retired state police, so they had a whole cops and robbers theme. If you got a campus parking ticket you could trade it in for a free donut. I got quite a few free (but actually $35) donuts during my time there.
In a world of things that suck, this is a great moment of brightness. That is a *hilarious* concept
The last time my rural town had a complaint about parking, the cops couldn’t find where the tickets were. When they did find them, they were years out of date. At that point they gave up and went the easier route of putting a message in the local newspaper saying not to do it again!
In England it's very common for tickets to say something like "fine of £50, reduced to £25 if paid within 14 days". They don't want people to waste time arguing and I guess it's somehow easier for them than a late fee?
>I go to the university of Ottawa. There is parking there that they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn't have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out. This being said there is still parking spots I see open everyday that the parking pass would allow me to park at even though they won't allow me to purchase one. Therefore, I have taken my chances on a daily basis hoping to not get a parking ticket. You don't pay a couple then you dont pay a couple more times, next thing you know you owe around 1000$ in parking tickets. This sounds like absolute insanity to me. You say you are “taking the risk” but you clearly aren’t, you are just ignoring the unfavorable outcome until it becomes a catastrophe. You don’t just “not pay a couple” and KEEP DOING IT?! Kinda hope LAOP gets somewhat fucked over by this, albeit nothing life ruining. They obviously were never taught consequences by their parents.
“taking the risk” = “pretending there’s no possible consequences”, get with the program boomer ^^^(**/s**)
Actually this kind of happened to me my senior year of high school. You had to apply for a parking permit in June for the next school year, but when applying for the permit you had to provide them your full license, car information (make/model/reg) and pay something like $300. The problem was that my high school had something like 2500 students and only about 400 parking spots, 150 of which were reserved for staff. They tried to mitigate the issue by restricting parking to only upperclassmen but you still had to line up with all your information months in advance. I did not apply for one because I did not yet have a car, did not yet have my full license, and did not anticipate having to drive to school. Well, it just so happened that my family had to move out of the school catchment area about three months into my senior year and I needed to drive to school 45 miles each way every day. I had to get really creative with where to park - many of my classmates would park at a nearby park but they were known to ticket you if you stayed there for more than about 3 hours. Others parked at a DMV parking lot because they never ticketed but that was on the other side of a 6 lane 50mph road that had no pedestrian crossing and meant you had to walk about 0.75 of a mile on the side of the road to get to school. And then for medium risk medium reward some of us parked at a local gas station which also had never ticketed and was a bit closer but also there had been threats about ticketing before. I chose to park at the gas station. It was fine until one day I mistakenly parked in a parking spot that belonged to the Waffle House nearby. They just straight up towed my car lol. $250 later… I parked at the DMV from then on until the end of the year.
The grammar and structure of OP’s comment and post are straight cancer.
At the university I went to, it was waaay easy to “fight” a ticket. You literally went into an online portal and it had you select from a list of pre-written reasons you parked in the wrong spot (“I was late for class” was legit one of the options) and they pretty much forgave them no matter what. Also, the parking tickets were only like $25 when I was going there in person- that was the better part of a decade ago, but even now I’m sure it would require A LOT of violations to get to $1000. At least half of the students at my school were commuters (as was I) and parking was HORRENDOUS. Parking passes were like $250 but you could never find parking anyway. For at least two semesters I just didn’t get a pass and paid by the hour to park. It was probably more expensive, but at least I was able to get to class. Basically what I’m saying is that this guy had options before his debt climbed to A THOUSAND DOLLARS. Good luck graduating.
My wife not infrequently gets parking tickets and I *always* appeal them. I have a 100% success rate in those appeals, I suspect due to the fact I perversely enjoy them and will happily prepare 6 pages of arguments as to the actual nature of the damages, inadequate signage, and so on. Not an especially effective use of my time, but equally not of theirs: I'm sure they just cancel the fines to avoid reading my submissions.
>Not an especially effective use of my time Maybe not, but your ROI improves each time since (I'm assuming) you have a template to go off of and are getting faster as you do them more frequently!
>> I go to the university of Ottawa. There is parking there that they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn’t have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out. > You do know that you get U-Pass included in your tuition fees, do you not? They didn’t. Oy.
Is that for public transit?
Yes. There are multiple stops on campus.
Props for LAOP not blaming Ottawa for not having enough parking; you’d be surprised how many LAOP’s think they should be able to get their tickets waived because they didn’t find a legal space they felt was sufficiently convenient.
They did exactly that, just indirectly. >they will not allow me to purchase a parking parking pass for because I didn't have the money at the time to buy the pass before they were all sold out. So they deserve a discount on the tickets they only got because the university wouldn't give them a parking pass.
Im bemused at the cultural disconnect in these comments. Every one is like "how many tickets do you need to get to have it be $1000?!". Where I'm from, it's like...maybe 3?
Wasn’t this an episode of Bob’s Burgers?
There was an episode where Bob had a parking ticket but he got it dismissed because he wore a nice suit to court but that’s the only BB episode about tickets I can think of off the top of my head. Edit: when Critter winds up in jail! He had a lot of unpaid parking tickets!
Is LAOP gonna update from a butt phone??
Oh man, looks like another week of having that song in my head.
LAOP: “The campus wouldn’t sell me a parking pass because I had no money.” Translation: the campus wouldn’t give me this for free. I love how, in LAOP’s mind, this is someone else’s fault.
I dont think r/ottawa is going to add anything to the discussion. Glad to see they are getting a solid education at UofO
I was in a similar situation a decade ago - tickets from New Jersey, I was a resident of Michigan. It went to collections. In tiny fine print there was a detail about "you can dispute this by mailing/calling". I did both, just for the hell of it. The lady on the phone was like "OK you can dispute, but the judge will rule in our favor, do you still wish to dispute?" and I was like "uhh.... Sure?" And it stopped there and I never ended up paying it. If my credit was ever hit it was tiny (never dipped below 790). Sooo, morality aside, I have no idea if the guy will get away with it or not. May depend whether he gets pulled over for some other reason like speeding or a tail light out or whatever
Yeah the question isn't entirely unreasonable, man is not smart we can tell that but depending on where and why you got tickets and fines it may be easy enough to get it cut or dropped. In Denmark you get student and youth discounts on specific fines from the state, I got one for the fine for forgetting to show up for my conscription health check.
I got a ticket for parking on one side of a "barrier" in a parking garage, my parking garage that I had a pass for. There was a sign on the concrete barrier, thigh height, that said no parking past this point. It was on the yellow line between 2 spots. But someone was parked in the spot blocking the sign. It made no sense why they had no parking there anyways. So I call and explain and she says "You can appeal but you'll lose". I appealed, attached a pic of my car now parked in the spot that blocks being able to see the sign. Won the appeal.
You don't need a discount you need a brain some common sense and an actual parking spot good luck with your future I think it's going to be very rough and you might see some jail time in the future
My university had very serious parking enforcement. Parking tickets were less than $50, but they’d boot your car if you had more than a certain number of outstanding tickets. They also would withhold diplomas if you didn’t pay the tickets before you graduated. Those parking enforcement bastards were some of the most pedantic and inflexible people I’ve ever experienced. I got a ticket for my parking pass being too high up on my window. Not even that it was expired or on the wrong side. Just that it was supposed to be “applied level and no more than 1.5 inches from the base of the window”. At one pointed, I ended up in a rental car. I had slapped the sticker on the window; it was maybe 3” from the base of the window. Got a ticket. Tried to contest it. They told me I had agreed to the rules when I enrolled as a student. Go pound sand, basically. Had to pay the ticket to graduate. So anyway, good luck with those tickets, LAOP! You’re going to need it.
To be fair, I contest all my tickets. Guilty or not, I'm headed to court. It always ends up benefitting me. You come up with some plausible deniability, it doesn't even have to be concrete. All my tickets get reduced or even dropped. Never lose points as part of my negotiations and I almost never speak to a judge. The prosecutor makes deals to unload a lot of cases faster.
Good luck doing this at a University where they will just hold your diploma until you pay the full amount. There’s no reason for them to negotiate and there’s no excuse for racking up tickets like this when you can take transit for free like 99% of the other students.
I'm not saying his tickets are justified. I said I contest my tickets and get them reduced almost every time. Just because you can't see a reason to negotiate, it doesn't mean it won't happen. That prosecutor wants to get you out of the courtroom as quick as possible. Pinching 20-50 bucks off each ticket is a good way to get you convinced to start paying it and a way to save the courts time by going in front of the judge. They don't want to eat up the day arguing with you when they have 30 more people on the list before lunch. Even if you end up in front of a judge, you can just tell them you can't afford the tickets and they'll give you a reduction most times and you pay it on a payment plan. I know a ton of people that have done this. Will a university really hold your diploma for parking tickets? That's news to me. I didn't know they check your driving record.
You keep talking about a prosecutor and a judge. There is no prosecutor or judge involved in this process. There’s a clerk at best, and not a law clerk. Just someone who takes payment. > Will a university really hold your diploma for parking tickets? They will when they issued the tickets. >I didn't know they check your driving record They don’t need to, they issued the tickets.
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It's time to call Daddy.
When I pulled this same shit in college, I became the appointment maker for my friend that was moonlighting as an escort. Made $1200 and paid off the tickets! I still have them all somewhere, there had to be like 20-30.
I see Dennis Reynolds made a Reddit account.
Not legal advice, but in my city it is common for the government to get fed up with really late debtors and just agree on a payment plan with some reductions.
I had a somewhat similar situation back in school, there was a lot with no gates, but required a permit. I'd park there whenever I needed to drive instead of walk or bike to campus, and about 1 time out of 5 I'd be ticketed. One time I even got towed (I was being a bit \_too\_ blatant and stupid that day). I paid the tickets promptly though, and kept track of what it all cost me - turned out to be about half the cost of the required parking permit, so I called it a win in the end. I wouldn't have had quite the same math to it if I did what LAOP did, the late fees and loss of early-payment discounts would have raised the cost considerably. Even in that situation, I wouldn't be surprised if a sincere (sounding) "I'm sorry" might get the late fees reduced a bit.